Like many beer fans, when husband and wife duo Brendan Pleskow and Jenn Sickels moved to Denver, they came in search of a great neighborhood brewery that consistently served up new and exciting beers to explore. However despite the fact that Denver now boasts over 70 breweries in the city, most do prescribe to the model of a set core lineup, that’s occasionally bolstered by rotating seasonal and specialty offerings.

For Pleskow and Sickels, they needed a bit more variety. “I hated going into the same brewery and having the same set taps,” said Pleskow. “Why not just do all specialty beers?”

So the long time homebrewer and full-time CPA, and his wife, an occupational therapist, decided to open their own brewery revolving around that very concept. Tomorrow’s opening of Alternation Brewing at 1539 South Broadway, will feature an ever rotating tap lineup that’ll range across all styles. With 10 draft lines dedicated to beer and another two providing non-alcoholic options, Pleskow and Sickels hope to bring great depth of variety to their name-sake alternating lineup.

“I’ll get bored if I brew the same thing over and over,” laughed Pleskow.

The two New York natives who met in college, had considered opening in their hometown of Buffalo, but decided that the market out east wasn’t conducive for the type of brewery they had dreamed of opening.

“I don’t think Buffalo is ready for the nano-scale brewery,” said Pleskow. “Most breweries out east open and immediately seek out distribution channels. I’ve never wanted to become a distribution brewery. We’ve always wanted to stay small, so we could have a very good handle on the quality of the beer and so that we could constantly change things up.”

Intently focused on keeping Alternation a small neighborhood operation with a focus first on beer quality, Pleskow noted that they drew inspiration from another fellow husband and wife team down the street in Sarah & James Howat at Black Project Spontaneous & Wild Ales.

Opening up any new brewery, let alone a family run brewery can be difficult. Pleskow and Sickels have already dealt with a number of setbacks and frustrations from contractors, as they’ve worked to renovate 75% of the building, that formerly housed a hair salon in the front and a Tai Chi studio in the back. But the two also welcomed their first baby back in July added another happy element to juggle during the processes.

“I think if we could do it when we didn’t work full time jobs and didn’t already have a kid, that’d be the best thing in the world, but that’s not life,” joked Pleskow.

Over the past six years, Pleskow has accumulated between 75-100 recipes and is excited to introduce the South Broadway neighborhood to a wide variety of styles ranging from an easy-drinking farmhouse saison, all the way to wild Brett’ed beers. When Alternation opens on Saturday they’ll debut with a New England-style IPA, an Imperial Red, a Barrel-Aged Mocha Porter, a Belgian Dark, a slightly tart Farmhouse Ale, a Salted Rye Porter, and a Chai Tea Saison. Alternation will also be donating a portion of beer sales to local charities from the moment they open this weekend.

We’re excited to finally be able to declassify a project we have been working on for almost a year: ROSWELL

ROSWELL is our Lambic-inspired, spontaneously fermented ale that is barrel fermented, barrel aged, and then refermented with high levels of one of six different fruits.

This beer follows our mission and is at the core of what we do: “To innovate in the research and development of spontaneous fermentation”. Our aim is explore the outer limits of coolship spontaneous fermentation. This beer was created to showcase a concept we call super-fruiting, where we use as much fruit as possible, while still calling it a beer.

Intense amounts of fruit was added to a blend of our spontaneous base at a very specific time in development. ROSWELL is made once per year during the late spring from a lambic-inspired wort that was brewed last fall. This gives us a beer that has all of the depth of flavor but with a lower acidity than it would have after spending a summer in the barrel – ideal considering the amount of acidity naturally present in the fruit. ROSWELL has a rich and beautiful spontaneous flavor, with a distinct funk, and complexity that stands up to and melds into the heavy amount of vibrant fruit flavor and aroma. Our true wild-caught microbes means that the beer is deliciously dry while still packing an incredible amount of fruit flavor.

ROSWELL is drastically different from traditional fruited spontaneous ales. The amounts of fruit used, combined with 100% spontaneous fermentation, yield something decidedly ‘otherworldly’. It is unlike anything that has been done before and cannot be replicated.

On July 22, join us for the public release of five bottle variants of ROSWELL and a special Brewed Food pairing with Tender Belly Bratwurst with pain de mie bun, kimchi and, gochujang mayo with a side of Hop Ash potato chips. Then on July 23, we’re hosting an exclusive, onsite only release of SIGN and a limited preview of our upcoming Biere Brut / Biere de Champagne made with Red Fox Cellars Barbera grapes.

Kyle Carbaugh had no designs on brewing sour beer when he and his wife, Miranda, opened Wiley Roots Brewing in Greeley four years ago. Their best-known beer early on was about as old-school craft beer basic as you can get — an American-style wheat. It won a Great American Beer Festival bronze medal just a few months after the brewery poured its first pint.

Carbaugh was all set to ramp up his clean beer production and purchase a canning system. Then he visited Jester King Brewing in Austin, Texas, a farmhouse brewery that creates exquisite beers with mixed culture and spontaneous fermentation. Carbaugh had some special company on that trip — New Belgium legend Peter Boukaert, the father of La Folie, the groundbreaking sour brown that inspired so many American independent craft brewers to tackle the style.

Carbaugh returned to Colorado a changed brewer. The order for the canning line was canceled, Carbaugh ripped up the business plan and Wiley Roots pursued a new vision — creating a series of sour beers that, as Carbaugh puts its, “are inspired by a time and place.”

At Avery Brewing 7th annual SourFest on Saturday, only the host brewery was pouring more beers than Wiley Roots. If you sampled any of those seven beers under Beer Tent No. 3, you found a good embodiment of what distinguishes Colorado’s burgeoning sour brewing scene: a veneration of the brewing traditions of Belgium, an all-for-one collaborative approach with fellow Colorado sour brewers, and an embrace of risk-taking, follow-no-rules experimentation on everything from different adjuncts to the kinds of barrels used.

There was a dark sour brewed with vanilla and coffee, a golden sour brewed with Denver’s Our Mutual Friend (also on its sour game), and a tart saison fermented with brettanomyces and dry-hopped with Galaxy hops — a crisp and hoppy relief after so much mouth-puckering.

“With the brewing industry, you have to be able to carve out your niche and stand behind your beer and product consistently,” Carbaugh said, reflecting on his change of brewing plans. “When you get inspired … We just could not come back (from Austin) and keep doing the same thing.”

In all, more than 35 breweries poured 100 beers at the state’s showcase sour beer festival, which for the second year was held at Avery’s campus in Boulder’s Gunbarrel area. Though it was sold out, the festival never felt crowded and few beers kicked so early that you couldn’t get a taste. The requisite bottles of Tums — thanks, Avery! — were set out on tables.

Avery, one of Colorado’s legacy breweries, is just as much big brother (in a good way) as festival host. Taking a breather from his own station to sample some of Avery’s gold-label sours, Powder Keg Brewing’s Phil Joyce described how Avery has given him access to its top-notch sensory lab to test his beers. Coors Brewing — represented at SourFest by its AC Golden line of fruited sours — has done the same over the years at its landmark Golden brewery.

“The bigger breweries are willing and excited to help the newer breweries because of their common interest in quality,” Joyce said. That is in keeping with how the Brewers Association, the industry trade group, has preached the importance of quality as craft brewing grows.

At SourFest, Joyce also poured two beers from his side project, Amalgam Brewing: a golden sour and an oak-fermented saison. If some brewers sought to stand out by pushing the boundaries on adjuncts and barrels, this was sort of a back to basics. “I want for beers to be an expression of a time, a place, a people — whatever that may be,” Joyce said.

Joyce and partner Eric Schmidt have a manufacturing license for their burgeoning Amalgam brand, so they can’t sell their beers. Joyce said the brewery is playing with an idea of a “gypsy taproom,” partnering with friendly liquor stores for in-store tastings and maybe some sales.

Like Carbaugh at Wiley Roots, James and Sarah Howat also upended their business plan, in this case dropping their original vision of Former Future Brewing and replacing it with what started as a side passion project: Black Project, focusing exclusively on wild and sour beer.

At SourFest, Black Project was pouring from bottles of Peacemaker, a wild wheat aged in Red Fox Bourbon cherry wine barrels. The sour and wild category is so wide-ranging, and Black Project is embracing that. Its “Mach Limit” series pushes the limits of how much fruit can be loaded into a beer for it still to legally be considered a beer. It brews a golden sour that is cold-steeped with light-roasted single-origin coffee, highlighting cherry and tobacco notes.

Marketing Manager Scott Davidson said Black Project is about to introduce a saison, with microbes caught from the coolship — a shallow vessel used for spontaneous fermentation. Colorado’s sour beer scene — with its balance of longtime veterans, breweries like Crooked Stave that have been at it for a few years, and this new crop of newcomers — “is not stuck in tradition, honestly,” Davidson said. “The beauty of American sours is that there are no rules.”

One category of sour beers was noticeable missing from the SourFest pour list: Kettle sours. Few topics are as divisive among brewers and consumers of sour and wild beer as these beers, which are soured in the kettle or mash tun and are much quicker and cheaper to turn than those that develop over time in barrels. By ruling out kettle sours from the fest, Avery was putting its flag in the ground, effectively identifying kettle sours as an entirely different category of beer.

Karbaugh, of Wiley Roots, is fine with that. He — like many other brewers — is not kettle-sour averse. In fact, his brewery packages a blood orange gose that is a kettle sour. The sticking point, rather, is breweries that portray and price kettle sours similarly to mixed-culture fermentation beers that can take 18 months to produce. It’s more and more common to visit a taproom and see kettle sours labeled as such, which Karbaugh sees as encouraging.

“There is a place for kettle sours,” Karbaugh said. “But there needs to be transparency.”

Black Project is doing some pretty crazy things with beer and we are excited to work together on this one. Chef Jeff has been meticulously planning the menu to pair perfectly with these wild ales. (This is one you won’t want to miss) Tickets are limited due to the size of the brewery, so snag your tickets now and worry about your date later!

Flavors of wine, bourbon, and tart acidity melt together in one bottle. It starts with a custom blend of two beers, both fermented from coolship-caught microbes. Once fermented, the beer is transferred to oak barrels that first held bourbon before their second life aging cherry wine from Red Fox Cellars, in the Palisade region of Colorado. After being freshly emptied at the winery, the beer was transferred to cherry wine barrels and allowed to rest and soak up all the beautiful cherry wine, rich oak character from the wood, and some of the original bourbon notes.

PEACEMAKER is part of our experimental series, which uses a blend of two spontaneous solera fermented beers. The blend is a combination of two base beers, one 100% wheat and the other, a golden ale, made with pilsner malt. Both beers were brewed on our 4 BBL system and then cooled in our coolship, a custom-built copper 12 BBL vessel designed to cool wort overnight while inoculating with wild yeast and other microbes from the air. In November, we expanded into the space next door to add 100 oak barrels and a new coolship, which sits under an open window with fans overhead to circulate the air. This allows the boiling wort to cool for 12 hours, which inoculates the wort with airborne microbes, including brettanomyces, lactobacillus, pediococcus, and saccharomyces. Once it is cooled, the wort is transferred to stainless-steel totes where it aged and fermented for 8-12 months.

This beer was created using a solera method, a process where unfermented wort is added to finished beer, which causes the active microbes in the beer to referment the new wort, creating an almost identical copy of the original spontaneously fermented beer. When the total volume has finished fermentation, a portion of the beer is then transferred to another container and the new, unfermented wort, is topped off to replace and referment on the existing beer. This is a continuous process that we have used for over three years to create one of a kind beers, as each beer changing slightly from the previous batch.

The base beer is funky and tart and pairs perfectly with the sharp flavors of the barrel, while still peeking through with a complex and unique character. This beer is the culmination of years of spontaneous fermentation, barrel aging, and a unique partnership with Red Fox Cellars. Bottles are extremely limited and will be sold on a first come, first served basis. This beer will continue and develop with age so drink fresh or save for later.

PEACEMAKER was named after the production of the Convair B-36 “Peacemaker”, originally created for the United States Air Force by Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corporation in 1946 as a piston-engine bomber capable of delivering nuclear weapons intercontinentally without refueling, with a range of 10,000 miles and a maximum payload of 87,200 lbs.

The B-36 set the standard for range and payload for subsequent U.S. intercontinental bombers.___________________________________________________

PEACEMAKER750mL bottle, cork and cageLIMITS AND PRICING TO BE ANNOUNCED*

*All limits are subject to change, at anytime, without advanced warning.

Former Future Brewing Company will always hold a special place in our hearts, the boxes of old merchandise – not so much.

So, we are getting rid of all of it, for FREE. Come down to Black Project Spontaneous & Wild Ales and buy a pint and we will let you pick from a random assortment of shirts, growlers, hats and other merchandise* that is taking up space at the brewery.

Cheers to FFBC!

*Merch is not available online or by phone, you must come into the brewery and purchase a 10oz beer to receive any merchandise.

1. (C) TECHNIQUE: Native Yeast BlendA propriety technique that helps remove much of the acid-producing microbes from a spontaneous culture, allowing for non-sour ales produced by the native wild yeast ecosystem

JUMPSEAT | EJECTOR (Bottle Only Release)

Bottle limits will be announced closer to the release date___________________________________________________

JUMPSEATBegins with their base Golden Sour aged for 8-12 months in stainless. Once the base beer is finished, they pull a small amount out of their ever-changing solera and transport the beer to another tank along with a variety of hops. The beer sits on the hops for 3-4 days, extracting only the bright and citrusy character from the hops.

While the combination of hops shifts from batch to batch, they typically select hops that will play well with their wild-yeast derived peach and apricot character, creating a beer that is just the right balance of hoppy and sour – perfectly crushable. Hop character will change or diminish over time, therefore they don’t recommend cellaring and instead suggest you drink this one fresh.

EJECTORBegins as JUMPSEAT, our single dry-hopped sour. Once the base beer is finished, they pull a small amount out of their ever-changing solera and transport the beer to another tank along with a variety of hops. The beer sits on the hops for 3-4 days, extracting only the bright and citrusy character from the hops. After roughly half of the beer is bottled to make JUMPSEAT, there is a second dry-hop addition and the remaining beer rests for an additional 3-4 days, creating more grassy, earthy flavors.

They like to think of EJECTOR as JUMPSEAT’S Big Brother: intense hop character matched with puckering acidity. Hop character will change or diminish over time, therefore we don’t recommend cellaring and instead suggest you drink this one fresh.

Hypersonic has been the most popular and juicy version of Black Projects wild yeast NE IPA series

That is why they decided to make a year-round beer.

They have also changed their method of hopping slightly, but still 8x dry-hopped. Hypersonic is not sour. It is made with wild yeast foraged from their neighbor’s apple tree in the Baker neighborhood of Denver, Colorado.

Each beer starts with wine grapes from locally-sourced, family-owned vineyards in Palisade, CO. Once the grapes have been destemmed and crushed, we allow the juice to rest for a few days – developing rich color and depth of flavor – before finally transferring the juice to neutral oak barrels along with our base Golden Sour. The beer then goes through a secondary fermentation while resting on the grapes, and after a few weeks is ready to bottle.

MACH-LIMITFruited at the highest limit allowed, thereby creating a beer that is truly something of a hybrid with intense grape character – almost sangria-like. This beer should age well with proper cellaring; however, the grape character may diminish over time.

Wine grapes from Mesa Park Vineyard

SUPERCRUISEFruited at about half of what we do for Mach-Limit, the stonefruit character from the base beer is backed by bright fruit and soft tannins, yet the beer still shines through. This beer should age well with proper cellaring; however, the grape character may diminish over time.

Black Project Spontaneous & Wild Ales was started three years ago, in secret, out of the back of Former Future Brewing Company.

The secret is out.

You’re invited to help them celebrate two days of special new beer releases, paired food tastings, and an onsite public cellar release.___________________________________________________

Friday, January 27 2-11PM**SPECIAL ONSITE PUBLIC CELLAR RELEASE**”They are popping bottles of previous bottle releases. Everyone is welcome to join. You may split these bottles four-ways, on separate tabs if you want. Please have ALL PARTIES available if you would like to split the bottle – otherwise it will go on one party’s tab until the other parties are present.

Each bottle will be priced separately.

**SPECIAL FOOD PAIRING**Brewed Food has prepared a special menu to pair with each beer. Guests will receive each specialty dish every hour with each beer tapping.$25 per person | 30 tickets available

Join Black Project Spontaneous & Wild Ales as they ring in their 3 year anniversary! They will feature a new beer tapping, every hour on the hour, paired with a unique dish designed for precisely for these special beers. Only 30 pairings available so get your tickets quick!

OXCART is the base for CYGNUS. It is their American spontaneous ale that was created using malted barely, unmalted wheat, and oats. OXCART is hopped with a blend of young and aged hops. Each batch was brewed and then cooled in their rooftop coolship overnight. While cooling, airborne wild yeast and other microbes inoculated the wort. This process spontaneously ferments the beer which is aged in oak barrels for 1-3 years.

CYGNUS is OXCART refermented for two months on 2.5 lbs/gal of Montmorency tart cherries.

The initial aroma is sweet cherry pie with a light effervescence and a tingling sour finish. The body and mouthfeel is complex with layers of funk, hay, and acidity. Fruit character dominates the aroma and flavor, but may diminish over time, so enjoy please enjoy fresh.

750mL bottle, cork and cage – $34/bottleLIMIT ONE BOTTLE PER PERSON | ONLY 100 BOTTLES AVAILABLE

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They will have six bottles of CYGNUS available for on-site consumption only, first come first serve. You may split these bottles four-ways, on separate tabs if you want. Please have ALL PARTIES available if you would like to split the bottle – otherwise it will go on one party’s tab until the other parties are present.

Three years in the making. OXCART is Black Projects first 100% spontaneous/coolshipped blend of 1, 2, and 3 year old barrel aged beer. Similar in method and in the style of the great, traditional Gueuze of Belgium. Notes of hay and stonefruit, with complex layers of funk. Some sweetness carries through each sip along with pleasant yet assertive acidity, ending with a dryness on the back of the palate. This beer is expected to age for many years, but is ready to drink now. Complexity will only continue to develop with time in the bottle.

750mL bottle, cork and cage – $30/bottleLIMIT 1 BOTTLE PER PERSON

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Draft Magazine just named this one of the Top 25 Beers of the Year. After nearly a year, we’re bringing back STARGATE: PEACH RYE WHISKEY. This time, using 100% whole fruit. from Palisade, CO. 2.5 pounds per gallon of perfectly ripe Cresthaven peaches from our family-owned orchard were added directly to the beer, allowing a secondary fermentation inside of a wet Laws Whiskey House Secale Rye Barrel. Intense peach on the nose with a soft, round mouthfeel and beautiful acidity.

In less than a year, Former Future Brewing has already produced a ridiculously popular Salted Caramel Porter and their first spontaneously-fermented coolship beer. Read Brady Akers’sbrewery showcase for an idea of what to expect in their taproom.

Black Project Spontaneous & Wild Ales is getting geared up for GABF week. The tasting room is open normal hours from Tuesday-Sunday. Outside of the tasting room, here’s a list of the events where you can find Black Project beers around town.